Wearable support with Salesforce1 Platform

Wearable is a generic term that is used to describe any digital technology device that is worn on the body to enable easy communicate and real-time information access.

Wearable technologies are one of the fastest growing areas as validated by many recent technology trends. As per some of the recent studies, there will be at-least approx 180M active wearables devices by 2018. And this is not just limited to smart watches or fitness bands/badges. There are whole lot of new areas like navigation, healthcare, payments, entertainment, customer service that are being explored by some of the leading providers. Biggest benefit delivered by wearables are context aware sensor feed that provides actionable insights to consumers as well as enterprises.

Whilst, wearables have become quite popular in consumer space and have gained tremendous traction/acceptance, enterprise space is also slowly catching up with ever increasing demands of generating actionable insights.

Wearable device integration is not just limited to smartwatches (Apple/Android/others) anymore. The ever-expanding list of devices that are offering support with Salesforce1 now includes,

Bio-metric devices (e.g. Nymi)

Smart Glasses (Google Glass, Epson, Vuzix)

Healthcare devices (e.g. Up)

Virtual Reality(VR) (e.g. Oculus)

Augmented Reality(AR) (e.g. Meta Glasses)

Here is a High Level Architecture for Salesforce to Smart Watch integration use-case. Integration with other devices can be created following the same principles.

By enabling support for wearables integration using Salesforce1 platform, Salesforce has made it a lot more easier to start building applications that are specific to their use-cases. To accelerate this development process they have introduced Salesforce Wear Developer Pack which is a collection of open-source starter apps that let you quickly design and build wearable apps that connect to the Salesforce1 Platform.

With technology world making rapid strides towards combination of VR/AR enabled devices, this next stage of “Consumerization” is bound to have it’s impact on how people would want to use their business applications in enterprise space. Would be definitely interesting to see how all technology vendors are going to respond to this going forward. And given that way Salesforce has renewed their focus on Salesforce1 platform, they have surely identified this opportunity and have joined the race.